Archive for category: Investigative Report

US Deportation Flights Return Haitians to a City It Warns Its Own Citizens Not to Enter

OPINION BY: Staff Writer September 2026

Human Rights Watch finds 474 people removed to Cap-Haïtien since TPS ended, received in a shipping container with no running water and $77 in cash

Since the United States terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian nationals in late July 2026, US immigration authorities have deported hundreds of people back to a country the US State Department itself rates at Level 4 — “Do Not Travel” — its highest advisory category, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The rights organization, which sent researchers to Cap-Haïtien from August 24 to 30 to interview arriving deportees and Haitian officials, found that more than 450 people had been removed to Haiti since July, according to figures from Haiti’s National Office for Migration. Between August 20 and September 17 alone, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated five consecutive weekly flights to Cap-Haïtien carrying a total of 474 people — a sharp escalation from the roughly one flight per month the US had operated before TPS ended. 

TPS is a US legal mechanism that shields nationals of designated countries from deportation when conditions there are judged too dangerous for safe return. Haiti was first designated in 2010, after the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, and the designation was repeatedly renewed as the country’s security and humanitarian crises deepened. The Trump administration moved to terminate the designation in 2025; after more than a year of litigation, the US Supreme Court allowed the termination to proceed on June 25, 2026. TPS for an estimated 330,000 Haitians lapsed on July 27.

A RECEPTION BUILT FROM SHIPPING CONTAINERS

HRW researchers were present at Cap-Haïtien International Airport on August 27 for the arrival of a deportation flight and documented the reception process directly. Deportees were processed in a structure converted from shipping containers, with seating for approximately 60 people and two toilets outside — only one of which was functional, and neither connected to running water.

Shortly before the August 27 US flight landed, a separate flight carrying 105 Haitians deported from the Bahamas arrived, exceeding the container’s capacity; officials erected a tent in an adjacent yard to accommodate the overflow. Neither space, HRW noted, offered privacy for individualized assessment of medical needs, protection risks, or other vulnerabilities among arriving deportees.

Officials from Haiti’s National Office for Migration told researchers they typically received about two days’ notice ahead of deportation flights, and that the manifests supplied by US authorities listed only names, dates of birth, gender, nationality and immigration A-numbers — with no information on the grounds for removal, medical or protection needs, or family contacts. In both flights HRW examined, the number of arrivals exceeded what the manifests had indicated: 161 people arrived on August 20, and 57 on August 27.

After registration, deportees received a meal, a drink, and approximately 10,000 Haitian gourdes — about US$77 — in cash assistance, before being transferred to Haiti’s Departmental Judicial Police Service for further processing. Beyond that point, HRW found, deportees are left to arrange their own onward travel and shelter. Haitian officials interviewed across nine government institutions — covering migration, health, child protection, education, labour, identification and justice — told researchers the government has no coordinated plan for deportees’ longer-term reintegration, no dedicated shelter, and no expedited process for issuing identity documents, which can otherwise take one to three months to obtain.

CONDITIONS IN HAITI

The US government’s justification for ending TPS was that conditions in Haiti had “improved sufficiently” to no longer meet the statutory threshold. HRW’s report places that determination against United Nations figures showing at least 19,380 people killed in gang, “self-defense group,” and security-force violence between January 2023 and June 2026 — with the annual death toll rising roughly 24 percent between 2023 and 2025, from 4,789 to at least 5,915, and at least 3,050 more killed in the first six months of 2026 alone.

Nearly 1.5 million people are internally displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and more than half of Haiti’s population requires humanitarian assistance amid crisis-level food insecurity. A UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force began partial deployment in April 2026 but has not reversed the trend, according to HRW, with criminal groups that once operated mainly in Port-au-Prince expanding into at least five of Haiti’s ten departments.

Flights now land in Cap-Haïtien rather than the capital because the US Federal Aviation Administration prohibits American commercial and US-registered aircraft from flying below 10,000 feet over Port-au-Prince, citing the danger posed by criminal groups controlling the area around the capital’s airport; the FAA extended that restriction in early September through March 2, 2027. Cap-Haïtien’s own population has more than tripled in two years to over one million, according to the city’s mayor, driven by displacement and returns from other countries, principally the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos — placing further strain on electricity, water and health infrastructure that officials describe as already inadequate.

DUE PROCESS CONCERNS

Nearly all of those HRW interviewed said they held TPS and had separately filed asylum claims, permanent residence applications, or other protection claims; many of which they said remained pending when they were detained. Most said ICE detained them before TPS formally lapsed on July 27, often without explanation, during routine check-ins, at home, or following traffic stops. Interviewees described being denied access to lawyers and, in most cases, not appearing before an immigration judge before removal.

HRW cross-checked available records through the Executive Office for Immigration Review and found some interviewees had, in fact, been issued removal orders prior to their deportation — orders they said ICE never showed them and which they said they learned of only when detained. Because deportees lack access to their own immigration files, HRW said it could not independently verify the complete history of each case.

Interviewees described custody conditions at facilities including the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami and the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, as well as detention centers in Ohio, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, citing overcrowding, inadequate food, limited access to medical care, and difficulty contacting relatives or counsel — findings HRW said were consistent with its own prior documentation of conditions at some of the same facilities in July 2025.

On August 24, the US Department of Homeland Security stated on X that 15 of the 161 people deported on the August 20 flight had criminal convictions. None of the individuals HRW interviewed were among those identified.

INTERNATIONAL LEGAL STANDARD

In August, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on the United States to ensure international protection where substantial grounds exist to believe a person’s return to Haiti would expose them to serious risk to life or physical safety, and stressed that deportation decisions must be individually assessed with access to due process and an effective remedy — a standard HRW’s report finds is not being met in the current pace and structure of removals.

HRW is calling on the US Senate to pass House-approved legislation that would extend TPS for Haitians through 2029, and on the US government to immediately halt deportations to Haiti in accordance with the principle of nonrefoulement — the prohibition on returning people to places where their life or safety would be at risk.

Sources draws on Human Rights Watch’s field investigation in Cap-Haïtien (August 24–30, 2026), interviews with 44 deportees, and review of flight manifests, government and UN data. — The 592 Guardian

 The Balloon Squeeze

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026         

 How a failed drug war became the biggest oil deal in history — and pushed the traffic our way

One year ago, the United States announced it had killed eleven people aboard a boat off the Venezuelan coast. The justification was drugs. There was no wreckage shown, no court, no named organization at first — only a Truth Social post and a video of an explosion at sea. President Trump called the dead “narco-terrorists.” The campaign that began with that strike now has a name, Operation Southern Spear, a body count exceeding 220, and an outcome its own architects did not advertise: it did not stop a single kilogram of cocaine from reaching the United States. It did, however, end with Washington holding a controlling stake in 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, and with drug flights over Guyanese and Surinamese airspace rising as traffickers rerouted around it.  

Both facts come from the record. Neither made it into President Trump’s account of his own foreign policy at the United Nations General Assembly this week, where he told the world the strikes had cut drug flows by 97 percent. His own Drug Enforcement Administration disagrees.

THE PRETEXT

The strikes began September 2, 2025, under the banner of interdiction. The legal theory was that the United States was in “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which meant the normal law-enforcement framework — interception, arrest, prosecution — could be replaced by summary lethal strikes in international waters, without congressional authorization and without the burden of proving, in any court, that the people killed were doing what they were accused of. Senator Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said plainly at the time that the military was not “empowered to hunt down suspected criminals and kill them without trial.” The administration proceeded anyway.

By December, the total stood at 87 dead across 22 strikes. By the time reporters could compile a fuller account in the spring, more than twenty strikes had killed over 100 people. The pace never slowed. Following reports that the first strike had included a follow-on hit to kill survivors in the water, Congress opened an inquiry and summoned the Navy commander who had overseen the operation for classified briefings. The administration’s answer to skepticism was less evidence, not more: officials described “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl” spattered across the ocean after one strike, and released no images to support the claim.

Venezuela’s government denied throughout that it played any organizing role in the trafficking the strikes were meant to punish. American intelligence agencies, by multiple accounts, disputed the administration’s central claim that Nicolás Maduro’s government was directing Tren de Aragua and the drug trade themselves. One argument aired early and often, including by critics inside the security establishment: the true objective was not interdiction but regime change, with the drug war supplying the pretext oil politics alone could not.

THE ESCALATION

By October 2025 the campaign had outgrown its own justification. Strikes that began near the Venezuelan coast expanded into the wider Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, hitting boats near Colombia and Ecuador. Trump authorized covert CIA operations inside Venezuela. The military buildup in the region became, by multiple accounts, the largest in Latin America in decades; an aircraft carrier, F-35s, a nuclear submarine — and Trump began speaking openly of land strikes to come.

They came. In January 2026, U.S. forces struck inside Venezuela and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Within days, Trump was no longer talking about interdicting drug shipments. He was announcing that Venezuela’s new interim government, led by Delcy Rodríguez, would hand over 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States — “to benefit the people,” he said, of both countries.

That was the opening bid. By August, it had grown by three orders of magnitude.

THE PAYOFF

On August 28, 2026, Trump announced what the White House called “the biggest oil deal in world history”: majority U.S. control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven reserves. The structure, released days later, was not a direct state transfer Venezuela’s interim authorities granted North American Blue Energy Partners — a private company controlled by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt, headquartered in Barbados; 100-year concessions across 17 oil fields. NABEP in turn gave the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital a 35 percent equity stake in its corporate parent, which the White House factsheet said represented “up to hundreds of billions in value and dividends for the United States.”

The fact-check arithmetic on Trump’s UN claim; that the U.S. and Venezuela together hold “more than 60 percent of the oil in the world” — is worth sitting with for what it reveals about the whole campaign’s rhetorical method, not just its inaccuracy. Venezuela’s proven reserves run to roughly 303 billion barrels; the U.S. holds about 46 billion. Together that is closer to 22 percent of global reserves, not 60. But the deeper distortion is upstream of the arithmetic: Trump described a 65-billion-barrel concession, routed through a private Barbadian holding company in which the U.S. holds a minority equity stake, as if it were sovereign American possession of the entire Venezuelan reserve base.

A year of strikes justified as narcotics enforcement produced, at the end of the line, a resource-access arrangement that the President Trump then rounded up to ownership of most of the world’s oil.

THE FAILURE AT THE CENTER OF IT

What the campaign did not produce is the part the administration has had to fight hardest to keep quiet. A Drug Enforcement Administration assessment, reported by the Washington Post in July and independently corroborated in a closed-door congressional briefing, found that the strikes had not moved the price, purity, or street availability of cocaine in the United States at any point in the year. Customs and Border Protection’s own seizure data showed cocaine volumes in the ten months after the strikes began were two percent higher than in the ten months before. Pentagon officials confirmed the same finding to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The current commander overseeing the operation has told Congress the boat strikes “aren’t the answer.”

What the strikes did produce was displacement, not deterrence. Traffickers abandoned the small “go-fast” boats that were the strikes’ preferred target, shifted to larger commercial vessels, moved closer to coastlines where the U.S. is less willing to fire, and increasingly turned to aircraft leaving clandestine airstrips on the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the DEA’s own assessment, those flights now head east — to Guyana and Suriname.

“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” one DEA official told the Post. Guyana is where part of it expanded to.

WHAT THIS MEANS HERE

The  592 Guardian has documented separately the migration cooperation framework under which the United States is routing third-country deportees through Guyana, with the vetting process and accommodation arrangements undisclosed and no legislative framework governing any of it. That arrangement did not emerge in a vacuum. It sits inside a wider regional posture in which Washington has spent a year building the largest military presence in Latin America in generations, capturing a head of state, and converting the operation’s aftermath into a resource-access deal — all while the stated purpose of the campaign, drug interdiction, failed on every metric the government itself tracks.

Displaced trafficking routes are not an abstraction for a country sitting on the flight path traffickers have chosen specifically because it is harder for U.S. forces to reach. It is a regional security fact with a Guyanese address, generated by a policy Guyana had no part in shaping and was not consulted on. The oil deal’s optics — American equity in Venezuelan concessions, American forces reshaping Venezuelan governance — sit alongside the accelerating US-China positioning this media has tracked around the Berbice deepwater port and the Hess-Bechtel financing shift.

The timeline sharpens the point. On August 12, 2026, the United States signed an enhanced US$2 million security cooperation memorandum with Guyana for “air domain awareness and unmanned aerial systems,” announced by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and framed publicly around organised crime and drug trafficking in general terms. No operational detail was disclosed — not the data-sharing architecture, not what triggered the timing, not why air surveillance specifically. That MoU was signed two weeks after the Washington Post’s report on the DEA’s internal assessment, which had already identified Guyana by name as a destination for trafficking flights displaced by the boat-strike campaign.

This publication  has been unable to confirm operational linkage between the two — the administration has disclosed neither — but the sequence is no longer circumstantial enough to ignore, and it belongs in the same accountability file as the deportee framework: another arrangement whose real rationale was not the one stated in public, but was kept shrouded in secrecy .

None of this required Guyanese officials to say a word for it to reach Guyanese airspace. That, more than any single fact-check of a UN speech, is the story: a policy sold on one metric, justified after the fact by a different and much larger prize, whose actual costs are still being paid by the people standing nearest to the parts of it that failed.

Footage of an actual strike : https://www.southcom.mil/News/PressReleases/Article/4606750/lethal-kinetic-strike-september-19-2026/?fbclid=IwRlRTSAUgu7VwZG9mAWZkaWQWUO_VnyLw8ytO0kvC4L4g5G6EHOlyM2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkCjY2Mjg1NjgzNzkAAR6CfgAVMZ_Jk7YLrgmYwBW9_gzyFmWaVHD_dkgBSSKG1qYJvfFY9qrSzgGDXQ_aem_hAzwVhysSQEMLXip1jShMg 

Sources: The New York Times (Linda Qiu, Sept. 22, 2026); The Washington Post (Alex Horton, July 27, 2026, and Post opinion desk, July 28, 2026); NPR (Nov. 12, 2025; Jan. 7, 2026; July 28, 2026); Axios (Oct. 28, 2025); Britannica; Georgetown School of Foreign Service (Michael Shifter analysis); Bloomberg (Sept. 1, 2026); Foundation for Defense of Democracies (Sept. 2, 2026); Energy Connects; WOLA civil society letter (Sept. 2026); Fortune (Jan. 3, 2026); U.S.-Guyana Security Cooperation MoU, Aug. 12, 2026 (Landau/Todd).

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

PART I: WHERE THE OIL MONEY DOESN’T REACH

The Cuban migrant crisis Guyana has no Policy to answer

By Staff Writer  | The 592 Guardian Investigative Desk

Armando no longer has a bathroom. His family’s house in Havana collapsed three years ago, and he now sleeps in a makeshift shelter inside an abandoned office building, using a plastic bag where a toilet used to be. He has not spoken out publicly about it, not the way a man who spent his life painting portraits of his country might once have wanted to. “I’m already hungry here,” he told a Human Rights Watch researcher this year. “If I speak out, I’ll just end up being hungry in prison.”

That is the calculation facing millions of Cubans: a state that cannot keep the lights on, the water running, or the pharmacy shelves stocked, but that can still find the resources to imprison a man for painting “how long, they are killing us” on a wall. An oil blockade imposed by the United States in January 2026 has driven that collapse into a new phase, cutting off the fuel Cuba depends on for electricity, water pumping, garbage collection, and the transport of flour to its bakeries. Roughly 800 Cubans are currently held as political prisoners for saying so.

Some of those who can leave are choosing, of all places, Guyana.

It is an unlikely destination on paper — a country of fewer than a million people, on the edge of the Caribbean, better known until recently for emigration than immigration. But Guyana is now the world’s fastest-growing economy, propelled by offshore oil discoveries that have transformed it from one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations into one of its most cash-flush. It does not require Cubans to obtain a visa before arrival. And its construction boom needs workers faster than its own population can supply them.

This desk’s investigation — including direct testimony from a Cuban migrant who escaped exploitative conditions in Guyana’s interior, published in these pages in April — found that need has not translated into protection. What we found instead was a labor recruitment pipeline operating in a legal vacuum, and a government response defined by jurisdictional shrugging.

A LABOR FORCE WITH NO STATUS

The people building Guyana’s boom are, increasingly, Cuban. Bloomberg has reported that construction firms behind the country’s roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects are turning to Cuban migrants as a primary new labor source, drawn by an economy supercharged by the same oil wealth connected, in a roundabout way, to the crisis pushing them out of Cuba. One government official told a television crew this year that Guyana now needs its migrant workforce as much as that workforce needs Guyana — filling gaps in construction, security, and cleaning that the domestic labor market cannot.

But Cuba is not a CARICOM member state, so its citizens arrive without the automatic work authorization and freedom of movement afforded migrants from within the Caribbean bloc. What has emerged instead is a large, informal labor force operating largely outside the system Guyana has built to register foreign workers — a system the government has itself acknowledged it is unprepared to manage at this scale.

The consequences of that informality are documented, and not only by this desk. One Cuban migrant who publicly warned others considering the move described working construction from seven in the morning to seven at night for roughly 6,000 Guyanese dollars a day — well under a dollar an hour, and well below Guyana’s minimum wage. He described street violence targeting migrants.

Migrant workers on the move

Our own reporting found conditions considerably worse than underpayment. A Cuban migrant who spoke to The 592 Guardian after escaping through Brazil described being recruited under a “work now, pay later” scheme: passage to Guyana in exchange for eight months of labor. On arrival, his passport was confiscated without explanation. He was housed with others in a room he described as having no privacy, air, or light, then rotated between construction sites and illegal mining operations. When his eight months elapsed, he was told he now owed for food and transport on top of the original debt — a balance that, he said, was never designed to reach zero. He escaped after a year and a half. Two women who had traveled with him in the same transport did not.

WHAT THE US STATE DEPARTMENT ALREADY DOCUMENTED

This vulnerability is not new, and it is not undocumented. The State Department’s most recent Trafficking in Persons report on Guyana states plainly that migrants — including Cubans, alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, and others — are among the primary victims of trafficking in the country, concentrated in mining, forestry, agriculture, and domestic service. The report notes that women and children from Cuba are at heightened risk of sex trafficking in Guyana’s mining communities specifically. It also documents hundreds of Cuban workers in Guyana understood to be affiliated with state-run labor missions, whose wages the Guyanese government has paid directly to the Cuban state — an arrangement the report identifies as one Havana has historically used to withhold earnings from the workers who did the work.

The same report recommends Guyana increase labor inspections at high-risk worksites, eliminate recruitment fees charged to workers, and screen vulnerable migrant populations for trafficking indicators before deportation — recommendations that describe, by implication, a system currently failing to do those things.

Our own findings corroborate that failure from the inside. The recruitment networks operating this pipeline advertise openly on Facebook, Instagram, and encrypted WhatsApp groups under banners like “Passage to Guyana: Work and Pay Later.” The operators pose as travel facilitators or small business agents; this desk found little evidence any are legally registered or subject to oversight. Guyana’s labor laws contain no comprehensive framework for regulating foreign recruitment agencies. Once inside the country, migrants exist in a status that is neither documented employment nor formal residency — a vacuum multiple migrants said is enforced by fear as much as by law.                                              “They keep us quiet with fear,” one Venezuelan worker told this desk. “Who will we go to? The police? They are friends with the same people who brought us.”

ENFORCEMENT AIMED THE WRONG WAY

Where the Guyanese state has acted, it has acted against the migrants, not the networks that traffic them. In April, a Cuban national was fined and deported within days of entering Guyana irregularly; a Guyanese official warned that “those who violate the law will face the full weight of the law.” A year earlier, another Cuban migrant was sentenced to three years in prison for the same category of offense — a marked escalation from the simple deportations once applied. Guyana has become, alongside its role as destination, a transit corridor migrants pass through en route to Brazil, and the state’s response to that flow has been prosecutorial toward arrivals, not toward the recruiters who profit from them.

When this desk raised the pattern of confiscated documents, unpaid wages, and confinement with officials, the response was jurisdictional deflection. “We need more data,” one senior agency source said. “We can’t regulate what we can’t track.” Labor points to immigration; immigration points to private enterprise. The cases fall between ministries, and in that gap, the recruitment networks operate undisturbed.

THE FRAMEWORK THAT DOESN’T EXIST

What Guyana has not built, in the middle of an oil boom it did not expect and a migration wave it did not plan for, is a coherent policy answer to the question of who these arrivals are and what they are owed. There is no dedicated Cuban migration framework — nothing analogous to the CARICOM free-movement provisions governing arrivals from Jamaica or Trinidad, nothing that formally distinguishes an economic migrant from an asylum seeker from a trafficking victim. What exists instead is an employer-driven work permit system built for a smaller, slower-moving economy, straining under a labor force arriving faster than the Ministry of Home Affairs can register it — a vacuum that recruitment networks have learned to exploit as reliably as any construction firm.

WHAT THIS DEMANDS OF GUYANA

Guyana did not create the crisis driving Cubans to its shores. That responsibility sits with a Cuban state that would rather imprison a protester than fix a water main, and with a US blockade that has turned an already-decayed economy into a humanitarian emergency. But responsibility for what happens to people once they arrive on Guyanese soil belongs to Guyana — specifically to the ministries with the authority to prevent exploitation and the standing capacity, and so far the unused capacity, to build the machinery to do it.

That machinery is not exotic: registration systems migrants can access without fear of immediate deportation; labor inspections at the sites the State Department has already flagged as high-risk; a licensing and prosecution regime for recruitment operators, not merely for the people they recruit; a legal pathway that does not force a Cuban fleeing a collapsed state into the same unprotected status as an employer’s convenience hire.

Armando, weighing his options from the wreckage of his own collapsed house, put it starkly: whether the extractive power is Washington or Havana, ordinary people do not benefit either way.

Guyana has the chance, uniquely, to be neither — to take the oil wealth reshaping its economy and use some measure of it to ensure the people building that economy are not also being quietly consumed by it. So far, the government has not shown it intends to.

Part II of this investigation examines the recruitment networks directly, the fate of migrants who disappear inside them, and what accountability — if any — has followed.

The 592 Guardian is continuing to investigate conditions facing Cuban migrant workers in Guyana. Readers or sources with direct knowledge are invited to come forward.